Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Despite having served as a fighter pilot in the Second World War, however, he opposed the war in Vietnam and proposed large cuts in military spending and amnesty for draft dodgers. In his acceptance speech, McGovern issued a prophetic critique of the nation and its culture of militarism. He promised to end bombing in Indochina on Inauguration Day, and within ninety days to bring every American soldier home: “There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools” and no more Americans sent to die “trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad.” He called on Americans to live with more faith and less fear. Countering those who said “America—love it or leave it,” he instead urged Americans to work to change their nation for the better, “so we may love it the more.” A small group of Evangelicals for McGovern rallied around the Democratic candidate, but they were a tiny minority. Powerful evangelicals like Graham and Ockenga publicly endorsed Nixon, and when McGovern spoke at Wheaton College, he was greeted with resounding boos.25 Evangelical support for Nixon was manifest at Campus Crusade’s Explo ’72. With an eye toward reelection, Nixon had been looking for ways to reach evangelical youth. At Graham’s urging, Nixon aide (and ordained Southern Baptist minister) Wallace Henley reached out to Bill Bright, head of Campus Crusade, to convince him to join in a media strategy to advance the conservative cause. By “media strategy,” Henley meant “doing things like syndicated news columns, developing evangelical-oriented radio and television spots, undertaking a specific effort to land some of the big names on Christian talk shows.” The possibilities were vast.26 Timed to the run-up to the election, Explo ’72 attracted 80,000 evangelical young people to Dallas’s Cotton Bowl. At a time when hippies were taking to the streets to protest the war, young evangelicals were celebrating Flag Day by applauding more than 5000 parading military personnel, saluting the Stars and Stripes, and cheering the South Vietnamese flag. Such overt displays of patriotism troubled some evangelicals; Jim Wallis and other members of the People’s Christian Coalition unfurled a banner lamenting the “300 GIs killed this week in Vietnam.” African American evangelist Tom Skinner said he didn’t have a problem with Flag Day, “but to associate God with that is bad news.” But most in attendance shared the organizers’ conservative values. They favored Nixon over McGovern by more than five to one; they also supported stronger penalties for marijuana possession and felt that American attitudes toward sex were “too permissive.” The event closed with an eight-hour Christian music festival, a “Christian Woodstock” attended by between 100,000 and 200,000 students, featuring “Righteous Rocker” Larry Norman, recent convert Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and other Christian musicians. Evangelicals had long rejected rock ’n’ roll, which they associated with drug culture and youthful rebellion, but by offering a Christian version of popular music, Explo ’72 helped pave the way for what would become a thriving Christian contemporary music industry.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  By the end of Reagan’s second term, in the absence of a common enemy, the power of the Christian Right appeared to be ebbing away.3 THE MOST URGENT ORDER OF BUSINESS was to elect a new president, but there was no clear heir apparent, despite the fact that one of their own had thrown his hat into the ring. Sometime in the mid-1980s, God had told Pat Robertson to run for president, according to Pat Robertson. In 1987 he announced his candidacy, but his campaign got off to a rough start when journalists uncovered the fact that he had been lying about his wedding date to disguise the fact that his wife had been seven months pregnant when they tied the knot. The media also discovered that, contrary to his claims, he’d never seen combat—his father, a United States senator, had apparently pulled strings to keep him out of harm’s way. These two significant issues aside, Robertson seemed to check all the boxes.4 Campaigning to “Restore the Greatness of America Through Moral Strength,” Robertson placed foreign policy front and center. He opposed arms control, denounced “Godless communism,” called for “the defeat of Marxist regimes in the Third World,” and vowed to “never negotiate with Communists or terrorists.” Robertson didn’t just talk the talk when it came to foreign policy. During the Reagan administration, he had expanded his evangelistic empire into Central America, and he came to support brutal right-wing regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala; CBN also became “the largest private donor to the Nicaraguan contra camps in Honduras” and a powerful advocate for aid to the Contras in Washington. On the campaign trail Robertson extolled the virtues of Christian America and railed against what he saw as an assault on Christian faith and values.5 Robertson’s CBN had an estimated annual viewership of 16 million and collected $2.4 million in contributions in 1986, and he hoped to translate this into political support, into an “invisible army.” Due to the improbability of his campaign, opponents and journalists used the term derisively, but Robertson embraced it. His army consisted primarily of charismatics, Pentecostals, and “spirit-filled” Christians, a subset of white evangelicalism, but he failed to win the support of most evangelicals. Falwell, LaHaye, Kennedy, Robison, and Dobson all declined to endorse him. This may have been due in part to professional rivalries, but it had also never seemed that Robertson had much of a chance of winning. For those who wanted access to the Oval Office for the next four years, backing the establishment candidate seemed a safer bet. But there was also the fact that Robertson’s occupation as a clergyman was seen by some as a detriment. It wasn’t just that he was a televangelist launching a campaign amid a slew of televangelist sex scandals, but many Christians themselves didn’t seem entirely confident that a pastor could provide the robust leadership necessary on the national stage. Certainly, Robertson paled in comparison to Reagan. Most evangelicals ended up backing George H. W.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Others are anti-religious – such as the sensational theory that COVID-19 was a synthesised form of cobra venom that was intentionally being spread via drinking water and vaccines, possibly as part of a plot by the Catholic Church to turn everyone into a ‘hybrid of Satan’. 3 Most, however, are based on cultural and political beliefs – such as an alleged London paedophile ring run by political elites, or the ‘Great Replacement Theory’ which holds that an indigenous white European population is being replaced by non-European immigrants. These theories often function as rallying points for social groups, especially minorities that are perceived or treated as marginalised outsiders. The rise of the Internet has led to uncontrolled dissemination of such conspiracy theories, which, on account of their ‘ubiquity and repetition on the net, have assumed a veracity divorced from reality.’ 4 As might be expected, these theories have attracted a lot of academic attention. Why do so-called ‘free thinkers’ believe such weird things? Although these were initially seen as pathological, perhaps resulting from ‘brainwashing’, 5 more recent studies have seen them as indicative of neglected aspects of human reasoning that illuminate how people arrive at beliefs, and enact these in their lives. Such theories tend to attract people looking for simple explanations for complex phenomena, and who are unwilling or unable to think critically. 6 Studies of followers of the ‘Da Vinci Code’ theory, for example, suggest that they were unable or reluctant to consider alternatives, or engage the evidence suggesting it might be a fake. Once they believed it, they couldn’t be swayed. A dispassionate observer of conspiracy theories might suggest that they indicate the danger of belief – people see logic where there is none and then refute anything that contradicts their views, sometimes to dangerous and violent ends. Conspiracy theories are certainly indicators of gullibility, the disturbing capacity of human beings to believe weird things. 7 Yet the best way to counter this is not to suppress belief as a general category, but to foster the emergence of a critical belief – that is to say, a belief that is affirmed knowing its vulnerabilities, in the light of an individual’s critical judgement that this represents the best way of making sense of things in comparison with a range of possibilities. The rise of a post-truth world has exposed a major concern – the public assertion of ideas that people want to be true, and retrospectively developing arguments in their support. As the satirist Hasan Minhaj observed, ‘emotional truth is first. The factual truth is secondary.’

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  The attorneys stand one by one to introduce themselves and their clients. The prosecutor wears a tailored skirt suit, and the male defense attorney has a swoop of hair that lays across his forehead like a paper fan. The second defense attorney is a woman in a men’s suit. I know it is a men’s suit because of the way it hangs straight at her hips. When she rises to speak, a smile blooms shyly across her mouth. Her teeth are gardenia-white. She’s said her name already, but I missed it. The judge presents the case, and then the attorneys ask us questions in rotation, calling us by the numbers in our plastic sleeves, weeding us out. They explain that this process has a name, voir dire, and that they’re looking to uncover our biases. There are so many of us, it takes hours. Finally, the prosecutor calls my number. She smiles and asks where I get my news. We banter a little about NPR. It turns out we’re both Terry Gross fans. She asks what I do for a living, what kind of writer I am. I am a writer who listens to public radio. Of course I’ll be eliminated. But they’re coming to the end of the numbers, and I’m still in the pew. They excuse another number, another. At the end of the day, there are eight of us left, and I’m given a new number, Juror #1, assigned to the first seat in the back row of the jury box. We’re to reconvene the next morning. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I catch an early bus and find I have a half hour to spare. I’ve worn a linen dress that I bought a couple of years before June was born. Usually I only ever wear jeans, but now that I’m on a jury, I decide to look like someone who takes this seriously. I sit down in a stripe of weak sunlight on a bench outside the courthouse and pull out a thermos of coffee and my magazine from yesterday. The defendant is arriving, and he sits with his attorneys on a low wall outside the front door. I watch them over my magazine. They huddle like football players, eyes closed. It looks like they’re praying. The testimony takes four days. It’s a civil disobedience case, and the judge has told us not to talk about it with anyone outside the courtroom, not even our families. We’re not supposed to look up news stories about it or Google anyone involved. Each morning we wait in the assembly room, and the bailiff takes us to a restricted-access elevator at the back of the building, careful not to cross anyone else bound for the courtroom. I didn’t want to be here, but since I am, I will do this right. I tune my body like an antenna, listen and take notes.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In a letter, written to friends in Bohemia on the eve of his departure, Huss expressed his expectation of being confronted at Constance by bishops, doctors,

• From The World of Biblical Israel (2013)

  100 Lecture 14: Life under Siege o Archaeological surveys of the Judean hill country show that under Hezekiah, many new settlements were established and the developed area of the capital city of Jerusalem was expanded. The most logical explanation for these new settlements is that some of the northern Israelites escaped deportation and fled south to Judah. Again, this explains how we get northern Israel’s history preserved in southern Judah’s Bible. o The biblical account of Hezekiah’s reign that begins in 2 Kings 18 spends little time describing this decade of prosperity. Instead, it moves almost immediately to Hezekiah’s military encounter with Assyria (2 Kings 18:7). Although this might suggest that Hezekiah’s rebellion occurred almost from the beginning of his reign, it is likely to have occurred after the death of Sargon II in 705, when Assyria was seen to be weak. • As a result of Hezekiah’s rebellion, Sennacherib comes to Judah to reassert his control. Hezekiah sends a message to the king of Assyria at Lachish, saying, “‘I have done wrong; withdraw from me; whatever you impose on me I will bear’” (2 Kings 18:13–14). • The biblical account does not stress Hezekiah’s military preparedness for an attack, but the archaeological record suggests that he anticipated a siege on Jerusalem. o An excavated city wall on the western side of Jerusalem suggests that Hezekiah had fortified the walls of the city in anticipation of an Assyrian attack. o Hezekiah also completed the Siloam tunnel, which would supply water to the city from the Gihon spring. o In addition, evidence in the form of hundreds of royally stamped storage jars suggests that Hezekiah stockpiled provisions of oil and grain in preparation for a long siege.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  ‘ { 4 13 RR | \ ZZ VA Then the wide countryside opened out again, and all the time I was looking out I never saw a vehicle on the roads, or a single human being except for the stationmasters who, whether from boredom or habit or because of some regulation which they had to observe, had come out on the platform at even the smallest stations such as Holoubkov, Chrast, or Rokycany in their red uniform caps, most of them, it seemed to me, sporting blond moustaches, and determined not to miss the Prague express as it thundered by on this pallid April morning. All I remember of Pilsen, where we stopped for some time, said Austerlitz, is that I went out on the platform to photograph the capital of a cast-iron column which had touched some chord of recognition in me. What made me uneasy at

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  My family was kind. I knew the conversation wasn’t easy for anyone in it. But I hated the questions they asked me, the fact that they thought they could. One asked how Brandon was doing “with it all.” I seethed, though the question was understandable. Brandon’s okay, I said; we still care a lot for each other. All I can say, replied my family member, is that Brandon is an unusually good man. When I was straight, I did not have to come out. Like my white skin, my being straight was a convenient default. There was a nice slip to it, an absence of friction. There was also privacy: when straight, I rarely had to disclose anything about my sex life. Even pregnancy, the visible fact of a baby protruding from my abdomen, unavoidable evidence of sexual activity, didn’t say anything about my sexuality. Only those who don’t fit norms have to put a name to their difference. The world has gay politicians and legal same-sex marriage, but there is still a thing called coming out. Now there would be endless occasions to out myself, whether I wanted to or not. Like at my dermatologist’s office one afternoon, when he inquired about my preferred method of birth control. Oh, I don’t need any, I said. Why not? he asked, swiveling abruptly from his computer and peering at me over his reading glasses. I’m dating a woman, I said. Ah! He laughed, visibly relieved. He’d worried that I would extoll the virtues of the rhythm method or prayer. I was glad for his mirth. I wondered how this conversation might go in a less progressive town. I knew I was fortunate to have other concerns. I was afraid people would think I’d been hiding it, that I’d been faking my way through life. I was afraid people would think that everything I’d been and done was a lie. I had written two memoirs featuring Brandon, our courtship, and our marriage. I built my career as a writer on a certain image, because that image had been true. But now the story I have to tell seems to undo all the ones that came before, the ones people have come to know me by. How does a person write truthfully about their life, when it isn’t finished? I wanted to be believed, though I struggled to explain myself. And if they—family, friends, readers—did believe me, wasn’t it almost worse? Then they’d see me as some kind of a contagious illness, something they or their spouses could catch. I’d seen the thought pass over friends’ faces as I spoke. I was a harbinger of unwelcome news: Look out, straight people! This could happen to you AT ANY TIME. On a weekend getaway, a friend confessed to me that her husband had joked that she would “go off into the woods with Molly and come back gay.” We both laughed. What else was I supposed to do.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  curiously remote state of mind induced by the drugs I was being given; both desolate and weirdly contented I wandered, all through that winter, up and down the long corridors, staring out for hours through one of the dirty windows at the cemetery below, where we are standing now, feeling nothing inside my head but the four burnt-out walls of my brain. Later, when there had been some improvement in my condition, I looked through a telescope given to me by one of the nurses and watched the foxes running wild in the cemetery in the gray dawn. I would see squirrels dodging back and forth, or sitting quite still, arrested, as it were, in mid-motion. I studied the faces of those solitary people who visited the graveyard now and then, or I observed the slow wingbeats of an owl in its curving flight over the tombstones at nightfall. Occasionally I talked to one of the other hospital patients, a roofer, for instance, who said he could recollect with perfect clarity the moment when, just as he was about to fix a slate in place, something that had been stretched too taut inside him snapped at a particular spot behind his forehead, and for the first time he heard, coming over the crackling transistor wedged into the batten in front of him, the voices of those bearers of bad tidings which had haunted him ever since. While I was there I also thought quite often of Elias the minister lapsing into madness, and of the stone-built asylum in Denbigh where he died. But I found it impossible to think of myself, my own history, or my present state of mind. I was not discharged until the beginning of April, a year after returning from Prague. The last doctor whom I saw at the hospital advised me to look for some kind of light physical occupation, perhaps in horticulture, she suggested, and so for the next two years, at the time of day when office staff are pouring into the City, I went out the other way to Romford and my new place of work, a council- run nursery garden on the outskirts of a large park which employed, as well as

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  A more consistent approach was developed by the philosopher Alex Rosenberg. In his Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, he sets out the view that that science is ‘our exclusive guide to reality’,12 offering us reliable certainties about our world and ourselves. In response to the question ‘What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad?’ Rosenberg declares that ‘there is no moral difference between them’. This alarming response needs unpacking. Rosenberg is advocating that the natural sciences are an ‘exclusive guide to reality’ – which precludes any moral values, in that these are not scientific notions. Science offers a descriptive account of how things function; it does not offer prescriptive declarations about what ought to be done. We need more than science to inform our ethics. Happily, science can answer most of our questions about the natural world, even if it can’t give us definitive answers to moral or existential questions. Science can certainly offer explanations for why we consider morality to be so important.13 For example, it could be argued that our evolutionary history predisposes us towards pro-social behaviour, in that this enhances our prospects for survival. But why should science be expected to teach us moral values? Or answer existentially important questions such as ‘How should I act?’ or ‘How should I live?’ It’s science, after all, not philosophy. Science has its own distinct toolkit, which enables it to answer its own spectrum of questions with unique authority and reliability. That’s one of the reasons why I love and respect science so much. But it doesn’t mean that science can answer all our questions, or that those that lie beyond its reach can be dismissed as pseudo-questions. Here’s the point: we feel that we need to answer moral questions – to be able to declare that certain acts are good and others bad; to name what we consider to be destructive to human wellbeing or the environment, and invest these judgements with deeper significance than a personal indication of distaste. Something deep within us whispers that these questions are important and need to be respected and answered. While modern psychological research does not (and cannot) tell us what it means to be ‘good’ or what we ought to believe about purpose or meaning in life, it makes it clear that these beliefs matter to people, and that they are integral to their wellbeing. And what about philosophy? Does it allow us to reach secure and certain conclusions, or should we think of it as offering us a critical tool for evaluating and calibrating our beliefs? Most philosophers are somewhat pessimistic about the ‘persistent and intractable disagreement’ within their discipline, often reflecting the difficulty in finding undeniable premises for philosophical arguments.14 The diversity and disagreement within the field is such that ‘most philosophical views are minority opinions,’ and there is typically ‘nothing approaching a consensus on the correct alternative’.15

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  “Resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering,” intones guru Ram Dass. As a kid I’d seen his name among my mother’s books, down at the end of the shelf where she kept The Dance of Anger and Love Is Letting Go of Fear. Now I knew why she had books with titles like that, whose unnatural collisions of nouns had puzzled me. Here was adulthood: my husband and I owned a restaurant. Love might have to look like letting go of fear. I could try. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Once I’d recovered from the shock and terror that we were, in fact, opening a restaurant, and once Brandon had recovered from his shock and terror at my shock and terror, we began to sort out a plan. With my book now finished, I was between projects, and this lull turned out to be convenient. I could gather up the energy I’d put into arguing against the restaurant and pour it instead into supporting it. I didn’t know what to write next, anyway, and it was a relief to not worry about it. I could worry instead about how to help Brandon succeed. When we got married, we’d each written vows. In mine, I promised to work alongside him to make our hopes and dreams real—a generic sentiment on paper, but when I spoke it aloud, I felt a current pass between us. I knew what this promise meant: that even if I couldn’t predict who he would be or what he would dream of, I had bound myself to him. It occurs to me now that I wasn’t worried about myself in this equation, about what I might become or want. I was the known quantity, he the variable. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We began to refer to Delancey as our restaurant. My first book was published four months before it opened, in April 2009. Between book events, I helped him to finish the buildout, plan the menu, and hire a staff. When Delancey opened that August, Brandon and I were two of the three cooks, him at the pizza oven and me making salads, starters, and desserts. I was a confident home cook, but in the restaurant, I was anxious and inefficient. I dissolved. A person’s got to be on good terms with adrenaline to make it as a professional cook: you’ve got to like the rush, rise to meet it and ride it through to the end of the night. When confronted with a fresh wave of orders, I’d cry, hurling handfuls of romaine punitively into the bowl. Resentment calcified inside me like a bone. After we closed up each night, we’d have to clean the kitchen, because that’s part of a cook’s job. On our days off, I’d do payroll while Brandon received deliveries. At home, we distracted ourselves with back-to-back episodes of Battlestar Galactica and plastic sleeves of sandwich cookies from Trader Joe’s.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I want to be a fish! she said, sitting up straighter on the toilet seat. I’ll be a pink fish! And you’ll be a pink fish too. And Daddy will be a purple fish. I lowered myself onto the wooden stool that my second cousin had given us when June was born, with her name and birthdate spelled out in puzzle letters. We’ll all swim around together. Right, Mama? She looked at me, waiting. I nodded, not sure if I was happy, or sad, or some third thing. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We swapped June on Mondays usually, sometimes Tuesdays. The first day without her was disorienting, as though I’d misplaced something terribly important, left my wallet at the store. But now I had time, gaping stretches of time, wide-open rolling meadows of it. I searched online for information about sexual orientation in women, trying to understand what had happened to me. One book kept coming up, so I ordered it. It was called Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire, by a psychologist named Lisa M. Diamond. When it arrived, I put it on my bedside table. Then I piled a bunch of other books on top of it. I caught up on the New Yorker. I went to IKEA, bought June a big-girl bed and assembled it. I started my first quilt. I’d learned to sew a couple of years earlier, when Brandon bought me a sewing machine for Christmas. Now with evenings to myself, I drank beer and watched YouTube videos with titles like “How to Stitch in the Ditch” and “Easy Improv Quilting.” I splashed around in my free time like it was an Olympic-size pool, all to myself. While prying loose a clump of dog hair stuck under a baseboard in the front hall, I got a splinter under my fingernail. The splinter was tiny, but I couldn’t get it out, and it leaked pus when I pressed on the nail. I called the doctor’s office, got a last-minute appointment with a nurse. Waiting in the exam room, I noticed the cover of a magazine on the chair beside me. It was a giant photo of a beaming Hollywood blonde, and next to her face, hot-pink letters shouted: 45 AND SINGLE! AND FEELING GREAT! Along came a fresh kind of dread. I took a picture of the cover and texted it to Matthew. Is this going to be me? I wrote. You’ll meet someone, he replied. How? Where? Anywhere, he says. You met Nora in a courtroom. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] On the mirror above the bathroom sink I stuck two columns of Post-it notes, reminders of things June and I were working on. June’s notes, in carnation pink: PEE BEFORE BED BRUSH 2x / FLOSS THUMB-SUCKING My notes, in light blue: BE CURIOUS BE PATIENT THE MISTAKE IS NOT IMPORTANT; THE WAY YOU RECOVER IS “YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO BE BAD AT IT IN ORDER TO GET GOOD AT IT”

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  87 Sunzi knew that civilians would look askance at this martial ethic, but their state could not survive without its troops. 88 The army should therefore be kept apart from mainstream society and be governed by its own laws, because its modus operandi was the “extraordinary” ( qi ), the counterintuitive, doing exactly what did not come naturally. This would be disastrous in all other affairs of state, 89 but if a commander learned how to exploit the qi, he could achieve a sagelike alignment with the Way of Heaven: Thus one skilled at giving rise to the extraordinary is as boundless as Heaven and Earth, as inexhaustible as the Yellow River and the ocean. Ending and beginning again, like the sun and moon. Dying and then being born, like the four seasons. 90 The dilemma of even the most benign state was that it was obliged to maintain at its heart an institution committed to treachery and violence . The cult of the “extraordinary” was not new but was widespread among the population, especially among the lower classes, and might even date back to the Neolithic period. It had strong connections with the mystical school that we call Daoism (or Taoism) in the West, which was far more popular among the masses than the elite. 91 Daoists opposed any form of government and were convinced that when rulers interfered in their subjects’ lives, they invariably made matters worse—an attitude similar to the strategists’ preference for “doing nothing” and refraining from rushing into action. Forcing people to obey man-made laws and perform unnatural rituals was simply perverse, argued the ebullient hermit Zhuangzi (c. 369–286). It was better to “do nothing,” practicing “action by inaction [ wu wei ].” It was deep within yourself, at a level far below the reasoning powers, that you would encounter the Way ( dao ) things really were. 92 In the West we tend to read the mid-third-century treatise known as the Daodejing b (“Classic of the Way and Its Potency”) as a devotional text for a personal spirituality, but it was actually a manual of statecraft, written for the prince of one of the vulnerable principalities. 93 Its anonymous author wrote under the pseudonym Laozi, or Lao-Tzu—“Old Master.” Rulers should imitate Heaven, he taught, which did not interfere with the Ways of men; so if they abandoned their meddlesome policies, political “potency” ( de ) would emerge spontaneously: “If I cease to desire and remain still, the empire will be at peace of its own accord.” 94 The Daoist king should practice meditative techniques that rid his mind of busy theorizing so that it became “empty” and “still.” Then the Dao of Heaven could act through him, and “to the end of one’s days one will meet with no danger.” 95 Laozi offered the beleaguered principalities a stratagem for survival. Statesmen usually preferred frenzied activity and shows of strength when they should be doing the exact opposite.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Communities of Belief as Places of ReflectionA second significant role of communities of faith is that they are places of reflection, in which beliefs are incubated and enabled to grow and mature within a supportive environment. The community of belief sustains and catalyses a process of learning about the intellectual and social world that these beliefs create. It is about exploring the landscape of faith, and learning to inhabit this new set of perspectives and relationships. To believe is to occupy the same physical landscape as everyone else, but to see it and experience it in a new and distinctive manner. The community of belief helps us to expand our vision of this landscape, and encourages us to go ‘further up and further in’ (C. S. Lewis) to this way of thinking and living. Communities of faith provide an environment in which their underlying beliefs – again, whether political, religious or cultural – can be studied, internalised and appropriated. Particularly in religious communities – such as churches, synagogues and mosques – education is seen as integral to achieving a mature faith, capable of engaging the world and sustaining a meaningful life. This typically takes the form of explaining the core beliefs and defining practices of a community and pointing to exemplars who are able to enact and model the community’s distinctive ethos. There is now a growing awareness of the need to prepare communities of belief for the challenges of living in a pluralist western context, in which there are no universally accepted norms of truth, justice or goodness, and in which nobody is seen as having privilege in matters of belief. While some communities of belief are trying to find an appropriate place and voice within wider culture, re-reading their histories to see if the past might help them navigate the stormy seas of the present, others isolate themselves from the complexities of our social world to maintain the myth of their totalising truths. This isolationism is a source of concern because it detaches such communities from the cultural mainstream, often leading to the perception that they are at war with, or threatened by, wider society. This can easily lead to alienation or even radicalisation within these communities, which result in political or religious extremism. Some Islamic communities in secular France or alt-right networks in Germany provide illuminating examples of this problem, for which there appears to be no obvious solution.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  We find ourselves drawn to the ‘necessary illusions’ and ‘emotionally potent oversimplifications’ that Noam Chomsky believed were constructed by governmental agencies to control public opinion. 10 We too easily allow ourselves to be cushioned against harsh truths by constructing worldviews that protect us from thoughts that we might find unbearable – such as the pointlessness of life, or the utter indifference of the cosmos to our presence. Yet the process of making connections is essential to the construction of beliefs, even if it can misfire. The French mathematician and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré helps us grasp this distinction: ‘Science is made with facts, like a house is made with stones, but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a pile of stones is a house.’ 11 Each stone is significant; yet we need to be able to see the grander structure of which it is part if we are to appreciate the wholeness of our world, without losing sight of its many individual aspects. Yet even here, there are uncertainties about the significance of this process. In the natural sciences, the debate between ‘instrumentalism’ and ‘realism’ continues. Is this ‘conceptual framework’ simply a construction of the human mind, which is read into or superimposed upon the real world? Or do we discern something that is there in the world? Have we invented something, or discovered it? Perhaps more worryingly, we often assume we must find a single master picture or narrative which makes all others redundant, exposing them as inadequate or even fraudulent. Yet while some worldviews demand exclusive control over our readings and interpretations of life, most are permissive, illuminating or interpreting aspects of life, and allowing supplementation from other perspectives. One of the reasons why I moved away from Marxism as a teenager was my sense that it imprisoned me within a controlling narrative and left me unwilling to acknowledge insights from other ways of thinking. The evidence clearly indicates that human beings are deeply pragmatic, working and living with a variety of big pictures, seeing them as helpful informing guides to some aspects of their lives (but not to others). The sociologist Christian Smith has noted how modern Americans draw selectively on about a dozen competing metanarratives – such as a Progressive Socialism narrative, a Scientific Enlightenment narrative, and a Christian narrative – to make sense of their world. 12 As Smith points out, these narratives are quite different, have different concerns and lie beyond empirical verification.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  THE NINTH STEPConcern for EverybodySo far we have confined our attention to the immediate community. But as we saw at the very beginning, this is not enough. Some religious traditions are more pluralistic than others, but all have at least one strand that insists that we cannot confine our compassion to our own group: we must also reach out in some way to the stranger and the foreigner—even to the enemy. Mozi put it clearly when he insisted that the well-being of humanity was dependent upon jian ai: “concern for everybody,” a principled and practically oriented acknowledgment of the absolute equality of human beings. It is now time to apply what we have learned to the wider global community. At an early stage of its development, tribalism enabled the human race to survive in harsh and inhospitable circumstances, but tribal chauvinism can be extremely dangerous. The Prophet Muhammad’s greatest political achievement was to find a way of helping the Arabs to transcend the aggressive jahiliyyah that was tearing Arabia apart. In the Qur’an, God tells humanity, “Behold, we have created you all out of a male and a female and have formed you into tribes and nations so that you may get to know one another.”1 Pluralism and diversity are God’s will; the evolution of human beings into national and tribal groups was meant to encourage them to appreciate and understand the essential unity and equality of the entire human family. But national or tribal chauvinism (asibiyyah), which regards one’s own group as inherently superior to all others, is condemned as arrogant and divisive. Tribalism in this sense is still alive and well today. If we continue to make our national interest an absolute value, to see our cultural heritage and way of life as supreme, and to regard outsiders and foreigners with suspicion and neglect their interests, the interconnected global society we have created will not be viable. After the world wars, genocide, and terrorism of the twentieth century, the purpose of the tribe or the nation can no longer be to fight, dominate, exploit, conquer, colonize, occupy, kill, convert, or terrorize rival groups. We have a duty to get to know one another, and to cultivate a concern and responsibility for all our neighbors in the global village. During this step, we begin to expand our horizons to make place for the more distant other. Understanding different national, cultural, and religious traditions is no longer a luxury; it is now a necessity and must become a priority. The Dalai Lama has pointed out that when countries, continents, and even villages were economically and socially independent and contacts between them few, the destruction of an enemy could have been advantageous for “us”:

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  increasingly tormented me. For over a year, I think, said Austerlitz, I would leave my house as darkness fell, walking on and on, down the Mile End Road and Bow Road to Stratford, then to Chigwell and Romford, right across Bethnal Green and Canonbury, through Holloway and Kentish Town and thus to Hampstead Heath, or else south over the river to Peckham and Dulwich or westward to Richmond Park. It is a fact that you can traverse this vast city almost from end to end on foot in a single night, said Austerlitz, and once you are used to walking alone and meeting only a few nocturnal specters on your way, you soon begin to wonder why, apparently because of some agreement concluded long ago, Londoners of all ages lie in their beds in those countless buildings in Greenwich, Bayswater, or Kensington, under a safe roof, as they suppose, while really they are only stretched out with their faces turned to the earth in fear, like travelers of the past resting on their way through the desert. My wanderings took me to the most remote areas of London, into outlying parts of the metropolis which I would never otherwise have seen, and when dawn came I would go back to Whitechapel on the Underground, together with all the other poor souls who flow from the suburbs towards the center at that time of day. As I passed through the stations, I thought several times that among the passengers coming towards me in the tiled passages, on the escalators plunging steeply into the depths, or behind the gray windows of a train just pulling out, I saw a face known to me from some much earlier part of my life, but I could never say whose it was. These familiar faces always had something different from the rest about them, something I might almost call indistinct, and on occasion they would haunt and disturb me for days on end. In fact at this time, usually when I came home from my nocturnal excursions, I began seeing what might be described as shapes and colors of diminished corporeality through a drifting veil or cloud of smoke, images from a faded world: a squadron of yachts putting out into the shadows over the sea from the glittering Thames estuary in the evening light, a horse-drawn cab in Spitalfields driven by a man in a top hat, a woman wearing the costume of the 1930s and casting her eyes down as she passed me by. It was at moments of particular weakness, when I thought I could not go on any longer, that my senses played these tricks on me. It sometimes seemed to me as if the noises of the city were dying down around me and the traffic was flowing silently down the street, or as if someone had plucked me by the sleeve. And I would hear people behind my back speaking in a foreign tongue, Lithuanian, Hungarian, or something else with a very alien note to it, or so I thought, said Austerlitz. I had several such experiences in Liverpool Street Station, to which I was always irresistibly drawn back on my night journeys. Before work began to rebuild it at the end of the 1980s this station, with its main

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  firmly in my hand all the way to Prague. Outside, the darkening Bohemian fields passed by, hop poles, deep brown fields, flat, empty country all around. The bus was very overheated. I felt drops of perspiration break out on my forehead and a constriction in my chest. Once, when I looked over my shoulder, I saw that the other passengers, without exception, had fallen asleep, leaning and sprawling at awkward angles in their seats. Some had their heads dropped forward, others sideways or tipped back. Several were snoring quietly. Only the driver looked straight ahead at the ribbon of road gleaming in the rain. As so often when one is traveling south, I had the impression of going steadily downhill, particularly when we reached the suburbs of Prague and it seemed as if we were descending a kind of ramp into a labyrinth through which we moved very slowly, now this way and now that, until I had lost all sense of direction. When we reached the Prague bus station, an overcrowded traffic junction at this early hour of the evening, I therefore set out the wrong way through the great throng of people waiting there or getting in and out of buses. There were so many of them streaming towards me out in the street, said Austerlitz, most of them carrying large bags and with pale, sad faces, that I thought they could only be coming away from the city center. Only later did I see from the map that I had reached the center not in a more or less straight line, as I thought at first, but by way of a wide detour taking me almost to the VySehrad, and then through the New Town and along the banks of the Vltava back to my hotel on Kampa Island. It was already late by the time I lay down, exhausted from the day’s walking, and tried to fall asleep by listening to the water rushing down over the weir outside my window. But whether I kept my eyes wide open or closed, all through the night I saw pictures from Terezin and the Ghetto Museum, the bricks of the fortification walls, the display window of the Bazaar, the endless lists of names, a leather suitcase bearing a double sticker from the Hotels Bristol in Salzburg and Vienna, the closed gates I had photographed, the grass growing between the cobblestones, a pile of briquettes outside a cellar entrance, the squirrel’s glass eye and the two forlorn figures of Agata and Vera pulling the laden toboggan through the driving snow to the Trade Fair building at HoleSovice. Only towards morning did I sleep briefly, but even then, in the deepest unconsciousness, the flow of pictures did not cease but instead condensed into a nightmare in which, from where I do not know, said Austerlitz, the north Bohemian town of Dux appeared to me situated in the middle of a devastated plain, a place of which all I had previously known was that Casanova spent the last years of his life there in Count Waldstein’s castle writing his memoirs, a number of mathematical and esoteric tracts, and his five-volume futuristic novel Icosameron. In my dream I saw the old roué shrunk to the size of a boy, surrounded by the gold-stamped

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  vanished from sight for a while, only to reappear outlined even more menacingly against the light. Marie, who was not so easily intimidated, merely laughed and said that the two shadowy riders were obviously the guard of honor specially provided by the CSSR for visitors from France. As we approached Marienbad along a road running further and further downhill between wooded slopes, darkness had fallen, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that a slight sense of disquiet brushed me as we emerged from the firs growing all the way down to the outlying houses and slid into the town, which was sparsely illuminated by a few street lamps. The car stopped outside the Palace Hotel. Marie exchanged a few words with the chauffeur as he took out our luggage, and then we were in the foyer, which was made to look double its size, so to speak, by a row of tall mirrors along the walls. The place was so deathly still and deserted that you might have thought the time long after midnight. It was some while before the reception clerk at his desk in a cramped booth looked up from what he was reading and turned to his late-come guests with a barely audible murmur of Dobry vecer. This remarkably thin man—the first thing you noticed about him was that although he could not have been much over forty his forehead was wrinkled in fan-like folds above the root of his nose—went through the necessary formalities without another word, very slowly, almost as if he were moving in a denser atmosphere than ours, asked to see our visas, looked at our passports and his register, made an entry of some length on the squared paper of a school exercise book in laborious handwriting, gave us a questionnaire to fill in, looked in a drawer for our key, and finally, ringing a bell, summoned as it seemed from nowhere a porter with a bent back, who was wearing a mouse-gray nylon coat that came down to his knees and, like the clerk at the reception desk, appeared to be afflicted by a chronic lethargy which incapacitated his limbs. When he preceded us up to the third floor with our two lightweight suitcases— the paternoster lift, Marie had pointed out to me as soon as we entered the foyer, had obviously been out of order for a very long time—he found it increasingly hard to climb the stairs and, like a mountaineer negotiating the last difficult ridge before attaining the summit, he had to stop several times for a rest, whereupon we too waited for a while a couple of steps below him. On the way up we met not a living soul except for another member of the hotel staff who, dressed in the same gray coat as his colleague and perhaps worn, I thought to myself, said Austerlitz, by all the employees of the state-owned spa hotels, was sitting asleep in a chair on the top landing with his head sunk forward, and a tin tray of broken glass on the floor beside him. The room unlocked for us was Number 38—a large room resembling a salon. The walls were covered with burgundy-red brocade wallpaper, very faded in places. The portieres dated from a past time as

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I can tell you with near certainty that additional communication will now be required: The busboy, a member of a profession largely comprising newcomers to America's shores, will have to take aside the already harried waiter. "Table seven. Lady say chicken cold. No like-a spinach." The waiter then must consider whether clarification, not to mention confirmation, is required before braving the chef's wrath. This means a trip back to the table, annoying the already annoyed customers by asking them to repeat their complaint. If you speak to the busboy, you might just ask him to locate your waiter. Better yet, try remembering your waiter's face. I also feel the waiter's pain when, without warning, a patron seated with friends at a table for four (a four-top) suddenly bolts to the bar (or outside) for a cigarette. This often seems to occur just when the entrees for that table are about to be served—or, as waiters say, are "in the window, ready for pickup." I know the electric shock that travels through the restaurant's spine and into the brainstem of the kitchen: The chef has that table's food up! It's sitting perilously under the destructive warmth of the heat lamps. Other orders are coming up around it, new ones are coming in, and the chef is beginning to freak: His lovely food is dying in front of him. And he's got a difficult choice to make. He can push the orders for the four-top to the side and squeeze other outgoing orders around it for a while, in the hope that the smoker will return before the food gets cold and ugly, a skin forming on the sauce that the chef was once so proud of. Or he can yank the whole order, move the "dupe" (the kitchen's printed copy of an order) back to the "order" position, and start all over again. It's a tiny, inconsequential move for the customer—a cigarette at the bar—but for the kitchen, particularly in a good restaurant, it can cause mad panic and much misery. It's polite to schedule your breaks ahead of time—as in asking the waiter, "Would now be a good time to grab a smoke?" The people at the two-top (a deuce) on my other side are friends of the house . . . or people with whom the house wants to become friends. I know this because I saw the military-type hand signals between the maitre d' and the front waiter when the couple arrived. I saw the brief, whispered conversation along the service bar. I can recognize the body language for "notify the kitchen" and "comp." These customers will be monitored as if they were in intensive care, with amuse-bouches and careful recommendations of the chef's best efforts tonight. I hope the cosseted duo will be suitably appreciative and that they understand that when the house picks up a check, it is appropriate for the guests to leave a cash tip, preferably a damn big one.